"Your Daily Tripod" reflects the personal Fourth Day journeys of its authors and editors. We are happy to have companions like you share in this project. Our prayer is that these reflections will invite and inspire your Fourth Day journey of Piety, Study and Action as much as writing or editing them inspires our journey and brings us all close moments with Jesus and our neighbors.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Love Without Strings

Brothers
and sisters: Strive eagerly for the
greatest spiritual gifts. But I shall
show you a still more excellent way. If
I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding
gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have
the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have
all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I
hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 12:31-13:3)

Piety

Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. (1 John 4:8)

Study

In the verses preceding those in our first reading, St. Paul has been
writing to the Christians at Corinth about spiritual gifts. He seems to think they may have missed the forest
for the trees. They appear to have
valued and desired certain spiritual gifts over others.

The apostle continues today by saying that we should all desire and pray
for spiritual gifts, and we should also keep in mind that when our lives in
this world come to an end, all these gifts fade away. More important than any of these gifts, says
Paul, is love. It’s the only thing that
lasts forever. And if the gifts you’ve
been given aren’t rooted in love, they’re useless anyway.

Paul is talking about a specific type of love, agape. Agape is unconditional love. It’s love that expects nothing in
return. It’s the desire for the
well-being of others. It’s extended to
others independent of how “loveable” they are. Agape is the sort of love God
has for all of creation and for you and me, in particular. In fact, in 1 John 4:16, we are told that God
is love, God is agape.

This summer I had the privilege of spending almost five weeks at a
Jesuit retreat house making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of
Loyola. Since I’ve been home, many
people have wanted to know about the retreat.
It was such a rich, deep, multi-layered experience that I find myself at
a loss to adequately describe it.
However, as I was reading St. Paul’s words to his friends in Corinth, it
occurred to me that the long retreat could be summarized as a means to recall
or discover, depending on where you are in your faith journey, how God is agape
in your personal experience. It is
overwhelming to spend days seeing how, in spite of my sins, my weaknesses and
failings, God has never stopped loving me!
The long retreat is also a chance to ask yourself what sort of response
you should make to this unfailing stream of love.

St. Paul suggests that one response is to be firmly rooted in love and
to show this same type of love to others.
He describes love as patient and kind, neither jealous nor
self-seeking. It sounds like he’s
describing the work of a lifetime.

Action

It is very difficult at times to truly believe that
God loves us unconditionally, because we know ourselves so well.Yet God loves each and every one of us just
as we are this very moment.What is your
response to this loving, merciful, gracious God?